RIPENING
SEASONS

Issue #36, February 2000

Wolf! . . . Wolf, Wolf!

I just thought I'd say it a
few more times, and get it entirely out of my system (whoops . . .
bad choice of terms - I think I want to forget about systems, for a
long time to come). Late as it is, I would prefer to have had this
nothing more than a bright and cheery Valentines Day hailing of a
brand new century. I am really not into any Y2K post-mortem, because
I'd like to leave that all behind, with little more than an
acknowledgement that my concerns and warnings were overdrawn, even
that I might have been overtaken by a touch of that crowd madness
that has been called Millennium Fever (in its Y1K version).

But the reason this is so late in February is essentially because
there is something to say about all that, and it has to be
said before I can truly let go of the stuff and move on out into the
landscape of a world that does, indeed, feel fresh and new.

First of all, I am not acknowledging any touch of
millennium madness. We were all a part - whatever part we played - of
a very extraordinary event that nobody seems able to understand. I'm
not claiming that I do, only that I sense its true dimension on the
basis mainly of how it turned out, and because I have long since
broken free of the constraints of Western logic and rational
analysis. I use those tools, but I haven't been chained to them for
years.

The New Years Day dénouement of the great Y2K bubble took
everyone by surprise -- and I mean everyone involved in the
run-up, from whatever quarter of approach, from the most fear-ful to
the most assuring. Absolutely no one expected the graceful and mellow
crossover, worldwide, that we saw, like a well-rehearsed soft shoe
dance routine. Continuing to monitor the various Y2K websites, over
the weeks after it happened, I found it almost a morbid
entertainment, to witness the twisting and squirming of
self-appointed cognoscenti, as they tried to account, somehow,
for the magic that took place.

It ran the full spread of back-pedaling postures, from face-saving
reminders of "what I said back in July..." to finger-pointing and not
so subtle blame-laying, to copping a mea culpa plea while swearing
the best of intentions, to cheery resumés of the good things
that came of it. But nary a one among them willing to go with the
likelihood that something really - but, really - unexplainable
had happened, and what that might mean, if so.

You might not know it, but there were many hundreds of documented
failures around the globe - so it isn't as though anything like a
certifiable miracle had happened. But the magic is that the world
hardly skipped a heartbeat -- not with all the
known-to-be-woefully-behind countries, or the admittedly
negligent towns and counties around America, or the small
business community that never did gear up for what had to be
done. Trying to factor in these elements, which were never
effectively disputed by those who could have known, is what has left
folks at the center of the Y2K imbroglio in a state of intractable
puzzlement, more than often registered as outright shock.

Yet, the part that puzzles me is that virtually none among them
was willing to peg it on something beyond the rational. Many of the
grassroots folks involved had long 'pedigrees' in the world of
alternatives, going back to the 1960s, with undoubtedly extensive
exposure to what I'll just call 'other ways of seeing things' -- yet,
there wasn't as much as a guarded suggestion of such a possibility,
among them. The closest, I think, was this strange formulation of
what I'd call 'pre-enlightened uncertainty' from Roleigh Martin, a
Y2K commentator who was generally capable of more clarity than
this:

"Y2K was an amazing non-event where both sides were right
to take the position they did because it caused the outcome that
occurred. It's impossible to argue that doing it over differently
would have caused the same outcome. One of history's weirdest
things, if you ask me."

Is it a failure of nerve (i.e., a wary refusal to speak of such
things, amongst an internet circle of rational people trying to cope
with a real-world situation)? Or is it an actual inability to make
the leap called for, when confronted by data that do not correlate in
a rational way? If the former, it cheats everyone down the line, of
the support that making such a leap could provide. But if the latter,
it probably constitutes the largest remaining hurdle to our moving
into a world mediated by another kind of thinking. Will it take
another generation, yet . . . or two, or three, before we'll be up
for that leap, on a culture-wide basis?

I ask the question as one for whom such a recognition, on a
personal level, has resulted in a considerably more open, effective
and satisfying life (albeit not by any typical measure). I don't
have, thereby, any answers to Y2K that would clarify for the rational
mind what took place, but I have a strong sense of it having been a
'response' to consciousness focused on a massive scale, and I can
reference a precedent or two, in that regard. (I put 'response' in
quotes, because I don't necessarily mean to imply any supra-human
agent for what took place. Nothing other than consciousness, itself,
as a formative cause, is really necessary.)

The precedent was the Berlin Wall coming down, and Russia's
repudiation of Soviet fascism, in a bloodless power shift quite
unheard of in such a system, not long after something we called a
'Harmonic Convergence' took place -- a worldwide, concentrated
prayerful focus on Peace . . . an event that was promptly forgotten,
and never associated with those subsequent developments!

An earlier precedent may have been our perilous, but successful,
half-century passage through the nuclear standoff era, during which
one bad move (like the Cuban missile crisis) might have sent the
world up in cinders. I can point to no single event of focused
consciousness in that period like the other, but the fact is, Western
world consciousness was turning, during the '60s, in a massive
influx of fresh insight, including influence from Buddhist and other
Eastern wellsprings. Today, however, the standoff is spoken of as the
proven effectiveness of M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction), in a
dangerously warped misreading of what really took place.

I don't know how long this sort of thing has been going on, on a
worldwide scale. But my guess is that it's a very recent development,
simply because the communication facilities required to collectivize
consciousness on such a scale are a very recent development on the
world scene. The continuing 'invisibility' of it, however, as a
function of nature, is not because of our insufficient exposure, but
because we consistently fail to recognize those effects. And
in that failure, we lose an exceedingly powerful support, in both our
social and our personal processes of change.

Look, I was a rationalist, through and through, when I 'dropped
out' from the world wherein my quite capable logic earned my income.
It was not something I was about to abandon, out of any frivolous
impulse. But in leaving my life's rut, I encountered a series of
'fantastic breaks' that eventually - in their persistent occurrence
and outrageous, odds-defying 'coincidence' - eventually
demanded of me a willingness to consider that they did not
fall into the category of rationally evolved events. Their origin lay
somewhere outside that order of explanation. If I had not been
willing to accept this recognition, and begin to re-order my life
under it, I couldn't have successfully navigated the risky effort to
reshape my world. So it is not insignificant!

It's my sense that this is precisely the kind of situation we now
face, as a society and culture with rationalist ways that have led us
into deeper waters than we can easily navigate. Our navigational
tools keep taking us further into a morass of intensifying issues -
political, environmental, and technological - and the clear question
is: for how much longer, are we to trust them?

Nature, consciousness, and the recent millennial occasion have
presented us with the cue of an alternative - one that is not easy
for us to understand. But this very difficulty is only representative
of the morass from which we try to evaluate the event. It challenges
us, however, to do some conceptual venturing. And it can only begin
on a personal basis, where each of us lives.

In summary, then, here are these thousands of folks around the
country, and many abroad, whose alternative visions for a better
world - perhaps dormant for twenty years, perhaps not - stirred them
to mobilize in a grassroots response to a common threat, and discover
in that cause a sense of personal renewal, as well as the power
inherent in making a difference in their world. And the big
event turns out to be a spectacular display of consciousness 'doing
its thing,' in a fashion so magnificent as to leave no doubt
of its magical potency. But instead of celebrating the occasion, they
massively (and ridiculously) fail to see the Millennial Gift that was
bestowed.

Reality did a shift, on cue, before our very eyes and for all
the world to see . . . but we, poor mortals entwined in
rationalist ways, to the point of discounting the very thing we yearn
for and witness, elect instead to remain stuck in our mud,
locked in our old minds, even as we proclaim a faith in the new. If
Y2K was a non-event, it is only because we met the wrong
challenge.

But that's okay. I'm neither surprised nor dismayed by this
failure. I've been around for well over a half-century, and have seen
both the suddenness and the gradualness of change: how it
suddenly shocks the world into awareness, but only
gradually comes to be accepted as real. What we so recently
came through was the sudden event. Now it will take awhile for the
gradual realization. A little patience is all that's required, for
things are moving right along.

Old! . . . Old,
Old!

If "Wolf" has been my
chicken-little call for the past year and a half, I've cried "Old
Age" for at least ten times as long, so I doubt if it makes much
registration any longer. But the current miserable fact is, I have
slowed down incredibly, and can't seem to keep an intended pace for
anything I'm doing, these days.

It's partly an actual slowdown, which has been creeping up on me
for years. But more of it, these days, seems to be an inconstant
focus -- sort of like browsing the web, where trails of association
take you off into some far hinterland before you ever get done what
you began with. And then there comes the difficulty of remembering
what you began with!

This issue of Ripening Seasons demonstrates it as well as
anything. I'd be embarrassed to say how many times and ways I've
begun the writing of it, only to lose the track of a theme, or come
back to it and wonder how I ever thought it was any good. I think I'm
beginning to understand what retirement was originally all about --
the poor soul just couldn't continue hacking it.

Retirement, in any normal usage of the term, was never a prospect
for me; but what actually seems to be happening is that parts of my
life, my world, my habit-ual pursuits and concerns, lose their old
hold on me. Sometimes with remarkable suddenness, but more usually it
takes awhile to dawn on me that I just don't care, anymore, about
something or other that once grabbed me.

Maybe I'm particularly aware of this, right now, because I'm just
entering a new 7-year cycle. On the most recent parallel occasion
(1993), I left my schooling and overseas adventure years behind after
a rugged year of resettlement blues; and in 1986, I embarked on the
full northwest resettlement experience after a year of tumultuous
dislocation. It helps to know one's cyclic relationship to the world
of events with such precision, believe me.

Each of those beginnings was preceded by a terribly irresolute,
unstable year of transition, which is pretty much what last year was
like, for me. And each presented me with a freshly open horizon that
offered no clue of what lay ahead -- but, instead, preoccupied me
with a writing project, while the future proceeded to shape itself. I
have no massive writing project, this year, but I have an equivalent
in the insistent urge to get back to the long-neglected work on my
Web site.

There are cues of another sort, too: the sense of certain
activities having grown 'stale' for me -- things that continue more
as habit, than from any of the joy or drive that once energized my
pursuit of them. These can cling tenaciously, even fostering some
reformulation in order to accommodate their further continuity. It
isn't always a negative thing, in that respect, either -- it kept my
Black Bart series going, through several such reformulations, after
the initial impulse and rationale had faded, for 12 years - nearly
two full cycles. And while I'm a bit loathe to admit it, at this
point, it was a waning interest in personal correspondence that
largely provoked the development of these Ripening Seasons.

But sooner or later, the 'waning interests' have to be faced and
dealt with, lest they perennially drag the poor, devoted soul
consigned to their repetitive indulgence into a backwater of
self-imposed stagnation. Our culture has 'haloed' the notion that
success is measured by permanence, and thereby suckered many people
into the tied-down agony of lifelong commitments - or, alternatively,
to stressfully high levels of guilt for not having followed through
on such promises.

I know, very well, what my stagnating habits are . . . but I don't
yet want to put any of them on the line of fire. Maybe I'll somehow
get to those library books I keep renewing but never find the time to
read . . . maybe I'll yet catch up on all my backlogged personal
mail, or maybe no one will notice if I start fresh with the next
batch. And that's the way it goes, my past lingering furtively into
my future, crowding for every inch of ledge space it can cling
to.

Ordinarily, by this time of year, I've caught sight of the year's
powering influence. But so far, I haven't see it . . . unless it
happens to be the appearance of a standout piece of software that Joy
impulsively ordered for the two of us, and that turns out to be mine
alone, because of connection problems with her computer. I intended
to get it myself, eventually, but her sudden impulse brought it into
my world during the sprouting time -- a particularly potent moment of
the year's passage.

It's an IBM microphone system called ViaVoice, that can be
'taught' to convert dictation, with all its personal nuances and
particularized vocabulary, into computer text - and my early use of
it gives every promise that it can do all that is claimed for it. I
watch my spoken words come up on the screen with a surprisingly high
degree of accuracy.

At least 90% of what I want to put up on the web site has yet to
be entered into the computer, and most of it is in a form that cannot
be readily scanned: hand-written and mimeographed, or typed with a
heavy overlay of corrections. So this is a real windfall for my
project, promising to significantly reduce the work and time required
of me. It is the first such software to emerge for the Mac, and to
see it come along at this particular moment, preceded by the
'seeding' of my iMac purchase, late last year, is an exquisitely good
omen.

So if I'm seeing this as the start of a new cycle for me, and even
talking about a waning interest in personal correspondence, where
does this situate Ripening Seasons, which has been so central
a feature of my cycle just ended? I hardly need reference the
circumstance that I so recently 'sheared off' a substantial slice of
the mailing list, and said that I'd not expect any more financial
support from the remaining readership, nor even correspondence any
more frequent than once each year. Clearly, this question has been
somewhere in mind, during last year's turbulence.

While it is hard to be sure of anything, at such a fluid
moment in the course of changing times, let me give you what
assurance of continuity I can: Ripening Seasons means a lot to me as
a vehicle for remaining in touch, and as the single active venue I've
got, for what I choose to write. In that latter capacity, it also
promises to be the bridge of a sustaining continuity on the web site,
itself. What I mean, is that I don't want a static web site, once I
get my past writing up on it. Life is a continuing stage for
reflection and understanding, and I hope to be writing my last such
piece in the week of my death, not sooner.

But how long this continuity will continue to go out through the
Post Office is something I'm a lot less sure about. Needless to say,
that is where all of its costs are, and most of the work
outside of the writing, itself. It's not a major concern of mine, at
the moment, and I don't know that it will ever be - and I,
furthermore, enjoy the physical art of layout and composition, even
though I don't put much imagination into it, these days. But the
world is becoming web-focused at an incredible rate, and other
factors (in that regard) may yet come into the picture.

I do foresee content and subject matter changes, in that I want to
turn more toward personal reminiscence and lifetime review. My
polemic days are pretty much behind me. I've little to offer that
isn't being said by countless others, from far more effective
speaking platforms than this little personal vehicle of mine. I do,
however, have an offbeat perspective on the world - with experience
to back it up - that is entirely my own, and best presented in terms
of my own life. Social commentary is implicit in my kind of personal
reflection, however, and having come awarely through two-thirds of a
century of significant social change, its impact on me could hardly
escape notice in anything I write, of those years.

I intend a topical approach, modeled on what I did in R/S #32 with
Me and the Automobile. I can see a continuing series of
'Me-and-' reflections taking shape, as I get into it, hopefully as
illuminating for you as they are sure to be for me. But they may not
be coming out at a six-per-year frequency, which is the pace I've
maintained for the past few years.

The one thing that still concerns me, however, is running out of
time, for what I want to get done. I'm encouraged by the fact that
two of my mother's siblings are living into their eighties, but I am
also acutely aware of a gradual deterioration in my own faculties . .
. so that longevity - such as it may be (and could it even be known
in advance) - is no guarantee, in itself, of a continuing productive
capability.

The turning of the millennium, however, could not have come at a
better time in my life, for it establishes the strongest sort of
boundary line. Along with the enhanced computer capability I now
have, and the provision for an ongoing web site (which is now at my
disposal, by the way - just waiting for material to be 'poured in'),
it situates me at a positive starting-point for exactly what I want
to be doing with the remainder of my time.

I hope this doesn't come across as too great an absorption with
morbidity. For me, it is simply taking a realistic look at where I
find myself, at this moment in time. But I grant a very necessary
respect to friends who 'outrank' me, on this score, and apparently
give not a damn for any of the obstacles that I worry over. Like
Bill Kaysing, a few years senior to me, who is even now
courting new love in his life, in Las Vegas; and Ray Redel,
who swore he'd try skiing at 80 . . . and has done it!